Category: Science

I read that the Space Shuttle made it back to earth today in California and that everyone was safe and on the ground. Was happy that everything turned out well for the crew aboard Atlantis and the Space agency after several problems were reported before the shuttle was schuelded to return to earth.

“That high school math problem with a page-long solution was a cakewalk compared to a recent mathematics answer that would ink an area the size of Manhattan if written out in small print.

A total of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists from several countries worked for four years to successfully map the inner working of E8 one of the most complicated structures in math, a 248-dimensional object. The findings were reported today by the American Institute of Mathematics.

“E8 was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood,” said project leader Jeffrey Adams, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. “This groundbreaking achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge, as well as a major advance in the use of large-scale computing to solve complicated mathematical problems.”

The mapping of E8, according to researchers, may very well have unforeseen implications in mathematics and physics which wont be evident for years to come.

Underlying symmetrical objects such as spheres and cylinders is something called a Lie group”a mathematical group invented by the 19th century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie to study symmetry. E8 is an example of a Lie group.

“This is an exciting breakthrough,” said Peter Sarnak, a researcher at Princeton University. “Understanding and classifying the representations of E8 and Lie groups has been critical to understanding phenomena in many different areas of mathematics and science, including algebra, geometry, number theory, physics and chemistry. This project will be invaluable for future mathematicians and scientists.”

The result of E8 and all its representations is 60 gigabytes in size, enough to store 45 continuous days of music in MP3 format. In comparison, the Human Genome Project holding the entire genetic code of a cell is less than a gigabyte in size.”

A really great success story click on the Headline to read the entire article via Live Science

MIT’s OpenCourseWare a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.Here is a short list of what anyone can learn for free via this amazing website.

“Scores of eminent scientists from India and the US discussed several key issues in the field of nano computing at the Indo-US Shared Vision Workshop on soft, quantum and nano computing being held here.

The workshop, held at the Dayalbagh Educational Institute, began Friday with a talk by Nikhil Ranjan Pal, professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He spoke on ‘Fuzzy Rule Based Systems: Applications, Design Issues, Solutions and Open Problems: Where do we stand?’.

Pal, an authority in the area of Fuzzy Systems, is a Fellow at the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), US, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He is currently a visiting fellow in Taiwan as well.

He stressed how effective the tool of Fuzzy Logic was in a variety of applications ranging from satellite image processing to medical image processing for the detection of cancer in the young. While covering a wide range of issues in the field, he also explained them with great lucidity.

The world of computing is set to be revolutionized with nano devices (nano = 10-9 m) wherein a few atoms would be manipulated to do computational functions to produce powerful computers that would make the computers of today appear pedestrian in comparison.

Ramnath detailed the work being done by developing carbon nanotube architectures to produce nanodevice architectures of the future.

‘Towards understanding the origin of genetic languages’ was the topic of Apoorva Patel, professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Lov K. Grover of Bell Labs, US, who chaired the session, said that Patel had made the presentation at his institute earlier and had been rated as one of the five most important talks ever given at Bell Labs.

In his talk, Patel explained how nature processes information in creating species with the lowest amount of information processing in the most optimal manner.

He provided pointers for answering the most complicated questions like ‘How did I come into being?’, ‘How does nature evolve life?’ and ‘What is Life?’.

Bringing together difficult concepts from Biology and Computer Science, Patel gave very convincing answers to some of these difficult questions on life”

I read this story off the wire you can read the entire story by clicking on the headline link was wondering if anyone out there has the speech in any format would love to hear more.